The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for avoiding tidying up the house by compiling a list of interesting reading from across the week, while trying to avoid mentioning a certain comic that may have been released. And how much I’m trying to avoid tidying can be ascertained by the length of this hefty Sunday Papers special…

The most essential thing from the week was Chris Delay’s look at Introversion’s 2008, where he talks candidly about how Multiwinia almost brought down the company. Full of totally hearbreaking vignettes. Choice one: “Tom had always fantasised about building a sales counter that would sit in the corner of the office and tick up whenever we sold a copy of a game. This time around he actually did it, building the device out of second hand parts bought from Ebay and writing custom driver software for it that linked directly to our Multiwinia sales counter. During our launch party dinner and celebrations that evening, what was truly amazing about this counter was how little it was actually going up. I’m not kidding when I say that we actually checked the connections and the software several times to make sure it was actually working, only to find out it was. Even then that very night we knew it was bad, that our whole future was in doubt.” Go read.

Clive Thomas at Wired, inspired by Jonathan Blow’s asking people to not use walk-throughs, segues close to something we were covering in the podcast – as in, the Internet’s effect on game experience, specifically puzzle solving. The solution of embracing the hive mind strikes me as somewhat pat. The vast majority of people in ARGs don’t solve the puzzles – they sit back and let everyone else find the answer for them. The people analysing Lost are mostly just consuming more slowly generated User-generated-FAQs. And “people know when not to use them” strikes me as pretty naive in a world where avoiding spoilers on a game solution is tricky, assuming you actually *want* to be involved in gaming discourse.